Noob question about server load

All of the Linux utilities I know of work with 1, 5 and 15 minute load averages, but I am working on something that could benefit from having a shorter load average, or even reading the load number rather than an average. Is this possible?

The load average is a rolling average of the the number of processes in the run queue divided by the number of processing cores. The first column of vmstat's output is the run queue length. So you could use vmstat|tail -1|cut -d" " -f2 to get a point-in-time snapshot of the run queue, then divide it by the number of cores. If you're consistently getting a number higher than the number of cores you have, that would probably indicate a problem.